Avoiding perpetual development syndrome

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1

Hi,

I have nearly completed development of my first game (word game) and I currently have working development versions on IOS and Android. The issue I thing I am facing at the moment is my desire to constantly add more features. I complete a feature and then think of something else that I think will improve the game. I am sure this is a issue that many developers face. I currently have a list of things I feel I want/need to do, e.g.

  1. Add ad mediation for reward videos (e.g. Unity ads, Admob, etc.). 100% required.
  2. Add a credits links section (citing for licencing purposes). 100% required.
  3. Adding word meanings. Not required however I believe it would enhance the game as there are words that some players wont know the meaning of.
  4. Facebook integration (likes, shares). Not required however I believe this will help with promoting the game.
  5. The next feature I think of, and so it continues. e.g. Maybe I will decide that twitter integration is also nice to have.

So my questions are:

  1. Where do I stop? I understand that you can improve the game at a later stage by adding features on future updates, however I am stuck with a balancing act of adding enough features that captivates my audience so that future update are viable.

  2. How to you decide on where to stop development?

  3. In your opinion should I stop at my required list of development to-do’s (1 and 2) or would it be worth the extra effort to include 3 and 4 and then make a hard unbreakable rule to not add a 5,6 and 7?

Help stop the insanity!

Regards,

John.

2

This is a really good question. It’s late and I’m tired, so this will be a sort of stream-of-consciousness answer.

First, I’ve heard conference speakers (who were very successful game developers) say you should forget about monetizing your game until after it is already successful. And my own experience seems to bear this out. Rocket Plume is, in my opinion and in the opinion of most people who have actually played it, an amazing casual game. Yet I’ve received zero revenue from my incentivized Unity video ads. I’ve also received almost no revenue from the in-app purchases. It’s a good game that good lost in the ocean of other good games, and with so many things competing for player’s limited attention spans, it just wasn’t sticky enough. So, I really shouldn’t have bothered trying to monetize it.

So, consider whether your 100% required item #1 really is needed at all.

Similarly, you’d think Facebook integration would help with promotion, but in practice I bet almost nobody ever uses it. I don’t have as much personal experience with this though.

Credits are of course worthwhile, and necessary if you’re using plug-ins or some such that demand credit. And I like the word meanings feature too; always good to educate your fellow man if you can do so in an entertaining way.

Beyond that… when to stop? You stop when you think your game is good enough to ship. Actually shipping a game is a chore in itself, and a fabulous learning experience for you, so you absolutely want to do that, and rigorously oppose anything that gets in your way — including your own desire to add just one more feature.

When we first shipped Rocket Plume, we didn’t have internet high scores. Users clamored for that, so we added it in version 1.1. In retrospect we might have done better to put that into 1.0, since it turned out to be such an important feature (users like competing with each other for the daily high scores), and because updating the app hides all the previous reviews (and we had a lot of great reviews for 1.0).

But if I had to do it all over again, I might do it the same way — far better to ship a game with a missing feature or two, than to have never shipped at all!

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Twitter integration in games is unbelievably pointless. I stopped following so many people there because their stream was filled with promotion of crap I don’t care the least bit about (games, services, retweets for competitions). Who cares if you can spell “cemetery” and how many points you got for it?

Facebook integration is equally pointless, because Facebook itself is unbelievably pointless. It might make sense for games where there are accounts, as it saves users some work if they can use an existing login.

Competing with friends or random Internet fools can be fun, however. Definitely include scoreboards and such, possibly challenge modes with restrictions later on (even rotating weekly, making it an event).

For ad rewards the trick is to make the rewards balanced, yet worth playing the ad for. I won’t say “view”, because who the heck watches the screen for those 15/30 seconds, right? I have no idea what a worthwhile reward would be for your game, but I personally am sick of getting a few gems for a video when anything worth spending them on costs hundreds of gems. For a word game it’s possible wildcard letters or free undos are reasonable rewards though.

Get a good, clean core game out the door with a few bonuses for ads - just enough game to start filling the leaderboards. Think of variations on the core game to release later, either as events or permanent additions.

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4

I tend to develop till I’m bored. Keep adding new features until its a chore to add new ones. Then release. Not sure if this is actually sensible advice.

Another option to fight scope creep is to plan a second generation project. In that one you can put all these cool features you don’t have time to work on now. Once generation one is released, you can consider if you want to build generation two.

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5

Thanks for all the advice. I have changed my thinking after reading this so have altered my to-do list as follows:

  1. Add ad mediation for reward videos (e.g. Unity ads, Admob, etc.). Half way completed so will continue.
  2. Add a credits links section (citing for licencing purposes). 100% required.
  3. Adding word meanings.

The reward system for my game is +2 free lives (reward video).

I will leave all other feature for future release.

When you say shipping the game, is that the same as deploying to IOS and Android? If yes, then I agree as I have looked into what I need to do and have found it quite overwhelming. I have already done a few of the steps (developer accounts, etc).

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Yes. There are a lot of hoops to jump through to actually publish your game. My best advice: take copious notes as you do it, because someday you’ll want to do it again!

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For the only game I actually finished, I had to cut a lot of features I wanted. I had already been working on it for about a year and a half, and I knew it was time to get it out the door. So I made a list of all the outstanding features that hadn’t been implemented yet, and ranked them by importance. Then each rank was further sorted by ease-of-implementation.

Anything in the MVP column had to be implemented. From there, I started into the highest priority list, beginning with the easiest feature. As I worked, I would rethink things and rearrange items from one rank to another. Or if something turned out to be more of a problem than I anticipated, it got bumped down the list.

Make no mistake: this is a tough pill to swallow. The final product wasn’t even close in scope to what I had originally envisioned. But I finished it. And to be honest, if I had kept working on it, there’s a good chance I would have lost interest and abandoned it altogether rather than publish.

I think it’s important to realize, too, that this MVP-focused cycle encourages you to refine and perfect the core element of your game, rather than get distracted by all the fluff (which, as anyone who’s read my devlogs will attest to, I am very guilty of doing). So if your core game element is fun, that alone will be enough to get people interested. And then all the fluff you add on later will only increase their enjoyment.

At least… this all makes sense in my head. By the time I plug myself into Visual Studio, though, I’ve forgotten common sense and get back to fluffing the fluff. :eyes:

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